A national Pain Crisis Protocol is imperative

There should be a pain crisis protocol for dealing with patients who present to the ER or urgent care with significant pain that is not related, or is disproportionate, to obvious pain causes (such as trauma, fractures, infections, heart attacks, organ disease, etc. — the issues that ERs are used to handling.)

The main function of the ER is to identify and stabilize conditions which pose an immediate or proximate threat to life or function. Ongoing conditions are referred to primary or specialist care for follow up.

Crises in ongoing conditions are clearly outside this realm. No wonder patients with pain flares get called drug seekers. Of course they’re seeking drugs. Their condition causes terrible pain crises at random times, often outside office hours, and their only option at those times is to go to the ER seeking the medication they genuinely need.

It puts both the ER staff and the patient in crisis into an intolerable position. A Pain Crisis Protocol, generated at the national level, could eliminate that problem almost completely.

It would provide guidance for further investigation and appropriate treatments (including patient-specific treatments) for the many pain crises that are not traumatic or otherwise obvious, such as flares of CRPS, fibromyalgia, lupus, RA, certain forms of blood dyscrasia; arthritis exacerbation; unexamined or ill-examined organ or CNS compromise; and so on — all things that do require ongoing specialist treatment and thus tend to leave ER staff ill-equipped to deal with, but which occasionally require immediate care for episodes of crisis.

It would also provide ways to move past the “you must be a drug seeker” mindset, which is prejudicial and unhelpful to all concerned. It would create useful ways to move patients out of the blame-the-patient path and into a constructive treatment path where pain gets treated as pain, addiction gets treated (not bullied or abused, but treated) as addiction, and physicians’ appropriate treatment decisions are protected from the political hysteria around the use of pain medications.

Many of these painful diseases require customized crisis management, because response to pharmaceuticals can vary so widely from one patient to another in these already fragile, destabilized systems.

Rationally, then, this would require specialists who treat people with these conditions to provide crisis-management protocols for each patient to the patient’s home ER in advance.

Since many specialists resist planning for such crises, specific guidance on this matter would lift a needlessly vicious burden from patients who suffer from diseases for which flares are an inevitable, if unpredictable, feature.

Moreover, if a patient must be admitted to an ER outside their home area, the admitting ER can retrieve the necessary patient-specific protocol from the home ER at any hour via phone and fax. Again, this would provide appropriate treatment without imperiling the patient with false, undefended, and prejudicial diagnoses or potentially criminalizing the treating physicians for using politically sensitive medication.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is going through another round of tortured logic around narcotic medications and pain treatment. Never in modern history has federal policy driven so much of medical protocol. (Informed dissent would be welcome. Looking forward to being wrong about this.)

The fallout in terms of patient care has been horrific, while addicts remain less treated than ever before and doctors are so hemmed in by inappropriate limitations on care that they can be criminalized for being responsive physicians.

It’s very odd.

Nobody wins — except the professional dealers, who don’t need to follow legal processes to access their product and have a growing pool of potential customers, many with a legitimate un-met need.

So, since the CDC is now so ready to get involved in the physician-patient relationship, it may be time to do so in a constructive manner. Creating a coherent protocol for pain crisis management, which provides forward guidance for ER staff past the fatality-eliminating process, safety for patients with a legitimate need, and appropriate diagnosis with rational intervention for addicts, would be wise. The money and lives saved would pay for it in the first year, if not sooner.